Patrick Jones a free-dragging manifesto(HOW TO DO WORDS WITH THINGS)

All writing is propaganda. —Derrick Jensen (among others)

1

Only words and conventions can isolate us from ...

2

... the entirely undefinable something which is everything. —Alan Watts 1

3

4

Leaving books

Early in 2004 Jason

Workman walked into my

bookshop in Trentham, a town

neighbouring the Wombat

Forest, north-west of the

Australian city of Melbourne.

The region, known since white

occupation for its timber, spuds2

and radioactive spring water,

was originally inhabited by the

Djadja wurrung people – possum

skin coat-makers who traded

survival textiles for European

pathologies. Workman left some

hand-made books and a short

note that effectively said, Perhaps

we’re on the same page?

At this time he was working

three shifts a week as a nurse at

a home for elderly folk, writing

essays, farming Namibian sheep,

gleaning from roadside fruit

trees and bottling the fruit, and

nearby I was attempting to make

a living from second-hand books.

While waiting for customers I

was drawing poetry and writing

art, sleeping atrociously (a new

father) and, for actual income,

building on my days off – bread

and butter money in John and

Janette Howard’s3 building boom

bubble.

Among the publications

Workman left was his essay

Practising in the Space of the

Everyday, which is both a critique

of culture capitalism and a

personal treatise for art-making.

In this essay, Workman explains a

way of making art that takes place

and is experienced in everyday

social space, that observes

intimate life as poetical and

material banality – sensitive to

place, unheroic, simple, gestural,

philosophical, non-exploitative,

humorous and tending towards

the loose. Workman: Art work is

‘supposed’ to signify something other

than what it appears to be. The process

required to decipher this ‘hidden’

meaning renders common, everyday

subjectivity inadequate as one requires

recourse to the code which enables the

specialised language of contemporary

art to be ‘read’. Artists ‘make happen’

but they do so predominantly through

the utilisation of mediating constructs

that hinder the possibility of direct

experience.4 At art school

I was initiated into a tradition of

art framed by its white definition:

art is a skill as opposed to nature. I

came to art school with a simple

desire to make life with art, but

direct experience was not what

the institution had in mind for

its students, with the exception

of one lecturer, Glen Dunn. Dunn

articulated art practice as being

like a child that wakes you in

the night and requires constant

attention and nurture.

Dunn was focussed on the

unfashionable principle of

observation. In life drawing he

asked us to look at the body,

find five tones, squint, then

ten, look harder, fifty and draw

them down. While the work we

produced may not have been

particularly consequential, it

was the practice of squintsight

– the idea of seeing everyday life

intensely – that enabled me, at

age twenty, to begin to be aware

of a world of generality, hype and

spin. But I also came to

understand that the flip side to

critical observation is dislocation

– from other things, other

people, and potentially from the

environment in which you live:

the romantic notion of the artist

as removed, strange and alone.

1. Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity: a Message for the Age of Anxiety (1951),

Rider, an imprint of Ebury Press,

Random House, 7th edition, 1997.

2. Potatoes

3. John Howard, Liberal Prime

Minister of Australia 1996–2007, and

his spouse Janette.

4. Jason Workman, Practising in the Space of the Everyday, privately printed booklet,

Victoria 2004.

5

In this post-democratic corporate

age, diminishing biodiversity

– caused by global warming,

gene privatisation and economic

theories based on profit growth –

is already radically reducing our

ability to live with and from the

land. And Governments are not

helping. The natural

world works by a synchronicity

of adaptive and haphazard

processes that feed and roll, build

and collide. We are decisive as

much as involuntary beings,

conscious and self-sovereign as

much as powerlessly hopeful

and enslaved. By

leaving his work for me at a small

rural bookshop, Workman was

strategically rolling dice. The

black dots that appeared face up

on the counter at Reverie Books –

spelled out the future anarchical

and chance-based practice of

WorkmanJones and, inevitably,

the cut-and-come-again seed

of this Free-dragging Manifesto.

By 1967 inventorist Marshall

McLuhan believed the singular

age of observation had given

way to a new age of pluralism –

one of social interdependence

triggered by electrical

information: The older training

of observation has become quite

irrelevant in this new time, because

it is based on psychological responses

and concepts conditioned by the

former technology – mechanization.5

McLuhan likened

mechanisation to a very linear

logic, which he believed was

ill-equipped to function within

the electric drama of the new age.

Renaissance Legacy. / The

Vanishing Point = Self-Effacement, /

Detached Observer. / No Involvement!6

Let’s be monist!

To see critically – to practice

observation and scrutiny – is

to find surprise in the smallest,

most inconspicuous, everyday

things. This is involvement.

And once you find surprise in

intimate and everyday things,

the spectacle of consumer culture

– the dominant hegemony – is

revealed as dull and vacuous,

abusive, dualistic and turgid.

While electrical and digital

technologies have encouraged

some unification and involvement

– the partially self-governing

environments such as YouTube,

blogsites and Wikipedia, for

example – McLuhan did not

foresee the continuation of linear

mechanised patriarchal logic

remaining with such brutal force

within the environment of his

global village.

In outlining his approach to

practising in the space of the

everyday, Workman advocates

non-exclusivity between

observation and involvement.

Workman: Life imposed

upon by the dictates of the dominant

capitalist hegemony carries with

it a price. What is that price? The

substitution of quantity (surplus) for

quality (meaning), the substitution

of survival for that of living. The ‘art’

of the spectacle is to ‘dress up’ survival

as life.7 If we lose the

ability to observe the interlocking

tones that make up the body of

the dominant hegemony, we lose

the ability to see and therefore

act against the ecocides and

genocides that are its inevitable

corollary. For, capitalism is

not a success story, although

we are repeatedly told it is.

Industrial civilisation

has fuelled population growth

necessitating increased food

production. Over the past

decade the US Food and Drug

Administration, stacked with

former Monsanto executives,

has relentlessly pushed seed

privatisation onto the global

village and begun to dump its

terminator (or suicide) gene

technology into the environment.

Monsanto’s terminator

seeds, which grow only when

sprayed with glyphosate based

Roundup, become sterile after

one generation. This Bush

Administration-endorsed

Roundup Ready (Rapture-Ready!)

bio-terrorism could potentially

obliterate seed diversity on the

planet, with catastrophic effects

for the majority of humans and

non-humans alike.

5. Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage, New York: Bantam Books /

Random House 1967, p8.

6. ibid, p53.

7. Workman, Practising in the Space of the Everyday.

6

7

In the chance Cage

…the Absurd is not in

man (if such a metaphor could have

meaning) nor in the world, but in

their presence together. —Albert

Camus 8 The word free-

dragging has no useful or logical

definition to speak of. It is a term

coined by Jason Workman and I

to mark a type of street art that

we have practised since 2005.

Where Workman’s reading of

Situationist International texts

greatly informed our practice, I

brought to the partnership the

influence of John Cage.

A significant early influence on

Cage was Sri Lanka-born Ananda

K.Coomaraswamy (1877–1947),

a translator of Indian culture

and philosopher of Indian art.

Coomaraswamy’s statement

that art is the imitation of nature

in her manner of operation became

a key premise upon which Cage

built a life’s work – creating

musical scores, lectures,

essays, poems and art prints,

while instigating numerous

collaborations with other

artists, dancers and musicians –

involving social and ecological

principles of participatory

anarchy and non-duality. Cage

made non-linear, de-authorised,

non-representative work that

could, like life, mimic, mutate

and regenerate. Composer and

conceptual composter, Cage

practised a mimetic, ‘post-

medium’9 art that included its

environment; that became its

environment; and he believed

that a work of art, like any

environment, is never static.

Cage’s broad practice

coincided with the land art

movement. In the 1960s Eastern

thought was once again having

a substantial impact on Western

art, and as a result the natural

world was back in focus. As

capitalism’s main thrust since

the 1920’s has been an ever-

expanding war on natural

ecosystems (with Monsanto a

consistently leading player), land

art and eco-poetics have been

direct responses from artists

and poets. Robert

Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970) is

a cornerstone of the land art

movement. It is an aggressive

intervention of dirt and rock

spiralling out 500 metres

into Great Salt Lake in Utah.

This work is an artist’s direct,

sleeves-rolled-up, encounter

with the land, albeit with

radical ecological disturbances

to the habitat caused by his

bulldozers. While it could be

said that this artwork is another

case of industrialised brutality,

Spiral Jetty has no museum

humidifier or white-glove

treatment that usually signifies

Western culture’s perceived

dominion over nature. Instead,

indeterminately and in its own

time, this giant scarification will

gradually crumble or subside into

the lake.

The lack of museum precious-

ness and the honesty of this

work has more in common

with the subsistence and ritual

land practices of traditional

communities – sacred earth

mounds, agricultural terracing,

carved rock housing, strategic

renewal burning – than with

the civilised foundations of

Western art. McLuhan:

The viewer of Renaissance art is

systematically placed outside the

frame of experience…Since the

Renaissance the Western artist

perceived his environment primarily

in terms of the visual. Everything was

dominated by the eye of the beholder.

His conception of space was in terms of

a perspective projection upon a plane

surface consisting of formal units of

spatial measurements.10

Australian cultural commentator

Marcus Westbury, in his 2007

ABC television series Not Quite Art,

observes that despite the Sydney

Opera House being a major global

tourist landmark, he cannot

think of one important opera to

have come out of Sydney since the

building’s inception. Westbury’s

argument is that museums bury

culture, not generate it. Similarly

he argues that classical orchestras

are exceedingly expensive cover-

bands, venerated by a cultured

elite and funded by governments

and corporations who recognise

art as either quantifiable antique

or the display of ‘genius’.

8. Albert Camus, ‘An Absurd Reasoning’,

The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), Penguin

Modern Classics, 1975, p.34.

9. Michael Farrell used this term in

regard to my practice, at a talk in

Japan on Australian poetry. He first

encountered it in the writing of

American art critic, professor, and

theorist, Rosalind Krauss.

10. McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage,

pp.53, 56.

8

9

10

11

12

In contrast, John Cage’s ideal

context for art is not artificially

segregated from life. When

confined to the monoculture of

the concert hall, the assembled

life is an integral part of the work,

as with his composition 4’33’’ –

the ‘silent piece’. In this work the

sounds of the audience’s coughs,

mumblings, chair squeaking,

shoe scratching etc. are heard

for precisely four minutes

and thirty-three seconds. The

performer, employed to create

the prompt for an environment

of listening, sits motionless at

their instrument. So there is no

virtuosic talent on display – the

expected convention at a concert.

A Shakespearian actor

recently told me that the most

powerful sound to be heard

during a performance is the

spontaneous cry of a baby. You

can’t compete with it, he said. We

were discussing Cage’s use of

chance after I had asked him

to read a randomnly selected

Shakespearean sonnet backwards

at a 2007 realization of Cage’s

Musicircus in Melbourne –

an event at which as many

musicians, actors, dancers,

artists, poets as were interested,

came together at a nominated

time and place, where they

performed independently but

simultaneously in a mass free-

for-all. Here the late composer,

or rather the well-turned humus

of his thoughts, continued to

provide a conceptual framework

for an event where we, the natural

world, were materially and

directly responsible for its multi-

layered form.

Where evolutionary biologist

Richard Dawkins uses the words

luck and random to split hairs

over the existence of chance

in evolutionary life, fellow

evolutionist, Douglas J. Futuyma,

is less pedantic: Chance means

essentially that you cannot predict

the outcome … Philosophers and

scientists use “chance” in the sense

of unpredictability … Evolution

certainly does involve randomness;

it does involve unpredictable chance.

For example, the origin of new genetic

variation by mutation is a process

that involves a great deal of chance.11

Workman and I found

by incorporating chance into our

practice, and therefore by not

being able to predict or determine

the outcome, we could lessen the

clutch we had over the things

we were making, writing and

doing. Cage’s interest

in relinquishing control lead him

to what he termed mesostics. A

mesostic is a centred acrostic – an

acrostic being a poem in which

the first letter of each line spells

out the subject word of the poem

when read vertically down the

left side of the page:

considerate of

others while immobile to our

militant rains –

pathologies turn beneath the

orange-active

skies of

transformation.

In a mesostic the subject word

falls in the centre of the page

with lines extending to the left

and right. Cage believed that

conventional representations

of thought as printed in books

did not facilitate the discovery

and expression of non-linear,

non-hierarchical ideas, but

rather endorsed uniformed,

authorised codes – words lining

up like soldiers of conventional

logic, marching across the page

in ordered formation.

Here is the first of 20 mesostic

poems from Cage’s book Anarchy:

the peter kropotkin mesostic,

composed in 1988 with the aid of

a computer program to simulate

the coin toss of the I Ching.12

I

sPirit of

him for onE

corporaTions

arE

failuRe

Know-how of

aRe

idOls will

free rePublic

each thrOugh

Them in

maKe

I

to me

aNarchism 12

11. Futuyma in conversation online:

www.actionbioscience.org/evolution/futuyma12. John Cage, Anarchy, Wesleyan

University Press (1988), 2001. p.1.

13

In introducing Anarchy, Cage

writes: My mesostic texts do not make

ordinary sense. They make nonsense

… if non-sense is found intolerable,

think of my work as music…13 By this

I believe Cage also means think of

my work as matter. Joan

Retallack, a poet and scholar of

Cage’s literary and philosophical

work (whose own book How to

do Things with Words, is a catalyst

text for this publication) writes:

Ludwig Wittgenstein, who felt the

language of poetry could express

certain things unspeakable in ordinary

language, lamented the effects on

philosophy of a general reluctance to

change language habits.14

Cage’s mesostic experiments

visually demilitarise and

semantically lessen the clutch

he had over his texts. They are

a model of doing-saying that

is directly involved with the

physical world, antithetical

to spin-doctoring and

authoritarianism – chance being

an antidote to spin because

the result is determined by an

indifferent collective (nature)

– even though the facilitating

framework is constructed

strategically by the author.

Liz Kotz in her book

Words to Be Looked At: Language

in 1960s Art, states that the

materiality of language is

enormously complex, making it

difficult to treat words purely as

things. By their nature,

words are both here – concretely and

physically present on the page, or in

the moment of utterance – and yet

also elsewhere – referring to, evoking,

or metaphorically conjuring up sets

of ideas, objects, or experiences that

are somewhere else.15

Cage’s mesostics are both here

and there; things and words, not

only matter, not only nonsense

or music, but observation:

corporations are indeed failure.

Following the lead

Scratch any educational

philosophy and you’ll uncover

a political scheme. Every time.

—Thomas De Zengotita16

Natural selection builds

child brains with a tendency to

believe whatever their parents and

tribal elders tell them. Such trusting

obedience is valuable for survival…

but the flip side of trusting obedience

is slavish gullibility. —Richard

Dawkins17 Today my

five-year-old son is figuring the

relationship between letters and

the natural world. He has just

enlightened me with his Ns and

Zs are from the sky, daddy. I look

over to the page on which he is

drawing. Ns and Zs bring thunder

and lightning daddy. I’m

not sure why this understanding

of the pictorial form of letters

in relation to the natural world

is such a revelation to me. I’ve

read with awe Johanna Drucker’s

Alphabetic Labyrinth, which

painstakingly illustrates the

evolution of letters from pictures,

and pictures from life.18 Perhaps

it has something to do with how

I continue to take the physical

properties of the alphabet for

granted, despite my practice of

poetry being very much focussed

on the materiality of language.

Or perhaps it is just that Zephyr’s

non-specialised, pre-schooled

mind is a free and responsive

conduit to nature.

Carl Orff, the noted German composer,

has refused to accept as a student any

but the pre-schooled child – the child

whose spontaneous sense perceptions

have not yet been channelled by

formal, literary, visual prejudices.19

13. John Cage, Anarchy, Wesleyan

University Press (1988), 2001, p.vi.

14. Joan Retallack, ‘What Is

Experimental Poetry & Why Do We

Need It?’ Jacket 32, April 2007, http://jacketmagazine.com/32/p-retallack.shtml15. Liz Kotz, Words to Be Looked At: Language in 1960s Art, MIT Press,

Cambridge, Massachusetts/London,

England, 2007, p3.

16. Thomas De Zengotita, Mediated: how the media shape your world, Bloomsbury,

London, 2007, p46.

17. The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins,

Bantam Press, 2006, p176.

18. Johanna Drucker, The Alphabetic Labyrinth, place, publisher.

19. McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage,

p56.

20. Gertrude Stein, The World is Round,

(1939), Barefoot Books, Boston and

Bath, 1993.

14

In 1939 the American writer

Gertrude Stein and her partner

Alice B. Toklas met a little girl

called Rose d’Aiguy and her

family, while holidaying near the

village of Bilignin in France. Rose

became the heroine in Stein’s only

work for children, The World

Is Round. In this work Stein

imitates the music and eloquent

nonsense she finds naturally

present in Rose’s imaginative

speech. It starts: Once upon a time

the world was round and you could go

on it round and round.20

In this work a child’s speech

dictates to the artist, and the

artist intelligently follows the

child’s lead. But in the writing,

the child is neither foreground

nor background; no Gestaltian

division of space occurs, rather

she is part of a Cubist field,

diffused throughout the whole

environment. I look

again to Zephyr’s drawing and

think about the world he is

defining, the world he’s stepping

into and think about Rose in

France in 1939, and what was

ahead of her.

But, even if the skyworks thunder and

blast the Ns and Zs above the land

base Ohs, for the culture of occupation

you’re raised the world is round like

an O, and you can go on it round and

round —

Z

N Z Z N

Z N Z

N

Z O N

Z ZN

Z Z N

Z

N Z Z N

Z N Z

N

Z O N

Z ZN

Z Z N

15

A contemporary of Stein,

Wyndham Lewis, discloses his

own literary prejudice when he

brands her work with crit-tags

such as child-personality and child

cult.21 Here the significance of

the child’s mind is lost on the

grownup; the primitive, child-

like or uncivilised is arrogantly

dismissed by the overly serious

and authoritative. The

schools that I attended were not

designed to follow the lead of

a child’s free and unspecialised

mind, or even meet it half way.

In fact the direct opposite was

true. The curriculum was top-

down authoritarian, and neither

practical nor philosophical.

We didn’t, for example, learn

to change a tyre, grow food,

recycle water, compost or build

shelter. Nor were we encouraged

to understand our activities as

affecting our environmental

footprint, despite what we’ve

known at least since Henry

David Thoreau (1817–62).

The young today

(1967) … encounter instruction in

situations organised by means of

classified information – subjects are

unrelated, they are visually conceived

in terms of a blueprint.22

Conformity and militarism

in mainstream schools is

continuing still. I have recently

witnessed children in both

Christian and secular schools

beginning a formal education

in which art classes comprise

each student colouring in the

same photocopied line drawing.

Art is taught as a completely

separate thing to English, English

as separate to science and so on.

This type of education primes

the child for a life alienated

from natural world processes –

compartmentalising knowledge

so that the links between

things are severed. If we cannot

see the links between where

we have come from, what

we become, what we eat and

drink and breathe, how we

say things and what we do, as

part of biological life, then we

have little to offer ourselves

or anyone else. In

schools the militarising effects

of uniforms, rows of desks,

lunchtime detentions, sports

fields, assemblies, hierarchical

social structures and time-sirens

all contribute to creating an

environment and calendar for

the production of the next-

generation consumer and

consequently the next-generation

abuser. Of course

some people will come through

the modern mainstream school

system and find significant

counter-points to a dominant

capitalist hegemony. But

sadly, most will become mere

instruments of commerce –

blind-led consumers following

their parents down a path of

debt and a lifetime of interest

on it: Christian-capitalists,

corporatist abusers, humourless

fundamentalists, proto-baby-

boomer-multiple-property-

owners, cashed-up-bogans (who,

according to the Australian writer

Catherine Deveny, are folk whose

TVs are wider than their washing

machines) or weight-orientated

(either the bulimic or unburnt-fat

variety) pop-fascists.

The newest subset that can

be added to this list is one of

the worst, and one of the most

camouflaged – the wealthy eco-

bourgeois shopper. Like the

English writer George Monbiot

I believe the zeitgeist of green

consumerism is just another

pox on the planet, where ‘ethical’

purchasing enables a plant-a-

tree-here-so-we-can-offset-the-

fuck-up-we’re-making-over-there

mentality. Monbiot: If

it merely swapped the damaging goods

we buy for less damaging ones, I would

champion it. But two parallel markets

are developing – one for unethical

products and one for ethical products,

and the expansion of the second does

little to hinder the growth of the first

... the middle classes rebrand their

lives, congratulate themselves on

going green, and carry on buying and

flying as much as before.23

Considering the civilised world’s

indifference and aggression

towards the natural world that

supports it, and its dependence

upon compliant citzens, it is

not surprising that children

and other uncivilised [sic] and

vulnerable beings are the focus

of intense recruitment and

oppression.

21. Wyndham Lewis, The Revolutionary Simpleton,” The Enemy, no.1 (Jan.1927),

quoted in Mark McGurl, The Novel Art: Elevations of American Fiction after Henry James, Princeton, NJ., 2001, p8.

22. McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage,

p100.

23. George Monbiot, ‘Ethical shopping

is a charade of the rich’, The Guardian Weekly, August 3, 2007.

16

17

The Stolen Generations of

Australian aborigines, created

through a partnership of the

Church and the State, is one

relatively recent example of this

oppression. Richard Dawkins

makes the point in The God

Delusion that there is little or

no difference between feeding

children the pill of religion,

the pill of Marxism, or that of

nationalism or consumerism. But

in medicating kids with ideology

some things seem to be more

acceptable than others.

Today, thanks to marketing

psychologists, child-focussed

consuming opportunities

(whether birthdays or religious

events such as Christmas and

Easter) occur almost every day

of the year. Treats of food, toys,

clothes and gadgets proliferate

and are abundantly available to

nearly every child born under the

banner: Ally to the American Empire.

In our civilised

societies, along with petroleum,

sugar is a key material of

exploitation and distraction,

effectively constituting a culture

of child-abuse. The average

Australian now consumes

22 teaspoons of sugar every

day.24 While in rich nations

responsibility-relinquishing

pathologies such as ADHD

and ADD are understood to

be exacerbated by highly-

processed, overly-refined food

and cheap distractions, rather

than modifying high-sugar

diets, many parents still prefer

to give their offspring sedatives.

Added to this, the schism

between our industrialised and

digitalised psyches helps to

generate tremendous anxiety

in parents, which is transferred

to children, making them

competitors and thus servants in

the global village. What McLuhan

failed to foresee in his electro-

romantic worldview, is that the

pathologies of civilisation and

progress – whether mechanised,

industrialised, electronic or

digitalised – are essentially

against nature, and for the

commodification of every aspect

of life. The anxieties

of parents are multiplied and

intensified by a smorgasbord of

activities invented and packaged

for and around children – pre-

natal university, Baby Einstein,

musical instruments drills,

early-onset multilingualism,

after-school tuition, the right

TV shows and clothing brands,

and a ready supply of sugar-rich

food treats. Modern parents are

being increasingly pressured or

pressure themselves to choose

more and more from this

smorgasbord because they are

terrified of being out of step, of

compromising their children’s

opportunities – terrified of

unconventional surprise, of

unscripted play, of raising

children who resent convention

and cultural militarism – and

terrified of lives that enjoy

a simple, everyday intimacy

with the natural world while

questioning the imperatives of

supermarkets, fast foods and

sweatshop-produced brand

names.

A sonnet for Zephyr (mesostic version)

ˇ

ˇ

Two Harriers circle above you

PrepAring ground for summer’s breed

No moRal pathology brings reed or stick

No weighty aiR of god to push –

Your small body playIng bones on the hill

No transformativE punishment

calls you heRe

Your Parents circle around you

Preparing beds on neArby hills

Cruel phantoms cReep your happy books

The myths of gods bEd lit to push –

Your body tucked N’er your father’s read

No material punishmenT callS you here

A sonnet for Zephyr

Two

Prep

No mo

No weighty ai

Your small body play

No transformativ

calls you her

Your

Preparing beds on ne

Cruel phantoms c

The myths of gods b

Your body tucked

No material punishmen

call

HAR R I E R

P A R E N T S

arriers circle above you

ring ground for summer’s breed

al pathology brings reed or stick

of god to push —

ng bones on the hill

punishment

e

arents circle around you

rby hills

eep your happy books

d lit to push –

’er your father’s read

you here

18

24. Rennee Switzer, “The Bitter Sweet

Truth”, Business Age, The Sunday Age, 17

June 2007.

19

20

21

22

The problem of civilisation

Like Cage, Jensen is multi-skilled

– an environmentalist, writer,

smallholding farmer and teacher.

His work is founded on a central

question: If civilisation is destroying

us and the earth, do we need to bring

down civilisation? Where

Cage saw authoritarianism,

and by association abuse and

exploitation, embedded in the

conventional setting down of

thought, Jensen sees these things

enmeshed in the spin-speak of

corporations and governments.

My dentist, a Muslim

Melbournian, added a line to

my (post-Christian) definition

of pop-fascism: “No longer is

a Goebbels-style propaganda

ministry required,” he said. There

is no single office of propaganda

that can be held accountable or

shut down because such obvious

and visible authoritarianism

would not be tolerated today.

Instead, political parties and

corporations thread propaganda

through the very fabric of

things making it harder to

identify and oppose. Through

their deviousness and our own

passivity, trust and hopefulness,

we have unwittingly become

pop-fascist subjects.

Australia’s representative

democracy, like the USA’s, is

essentially a parliamentary

system with two main parties,

both of which are further to the

right politically than the general

population. According to my slow

food cook friend Gary Thomas,

while aspiring representatives

may be motivated by a genuine

commitment to their local

communities, once in office they

become increasingly subservient

to national and global industry

needs.

The constituency’s acceptance

of this situation, and our

reluctance to organise active

participatory democracy in

the form of grass-roots, self-

governing communities, assists

this state of centralised pop-

fascism. Demoralised by debt,

our political will is weakened

and, although cheered-up with

spasms of pop culture, we accept

top-down government. We

have become apolitical in the

wrong way – anti-intellectually.

Anarchism and

participatory democracy have

more in common with each

other than representative

democracy, which today favours

monocultural corporatism. This

essentially means, in rich nations

at least, that existence within the

global village is the enslavement

of a majority who appear rich,

for the benefit of a few who are

genuinely rich.

Just as Al Qaeda is simply the

collective name for many varied-

scale transnational Islamic

militias connected by a common

cause, pop-fascism is a collective

name for many varied-scale

transnational corporations (and

their supporters: the share-

holders/consumers) connected

by a common cause. And in

American styled pop-fascism

(including secular, Christian and

Judaic brands), as in jihad, the

propaganda is instilled in the

children early on.

Actions are held to be good

or bad, not on their own merits, but

according to who does them, and there

is almost no kind of outrage – torture,

the use of hostages, forced labour,

mass deportations, imprisonment

without trial, forgery, assassination,

the bombing of civilians – which

does not change its moral colour

when it is committed by “our” side.25

—George Orwell

We’re at the start of this new wave

where the environment is going to be

economically priced but there’s a long

way to go … it’s a bit early in the piece

to start patting everyone on the back. 26 Dorjee Sun, a young Sydney

businessman, 2007.

We are enslaved by debt, made

docile by entertainment, addicted

to some substance or situation,

and hopeful that somebody or

something will deliver us from

it all. This is the general state of

pop-fascism in which we live,

governed by corporatism – the

private control of trade and

industry in collusion with the

state – to the detriment of the

environment and society at

large. More urgent

and pragmatic than Cage’s

conceptual, eco-anarchical

writing and Gertrude Stein’s

world-as-everything experiments

concerning the seeing of things

before the speaking of words,

is Derrick Jensen’s recent work.

25. George Orwell, “Notes on

Nationalism”, May 1945, Essays, Penguin

Classics, 1994 p.300–317.

26. Dorjee Sun, “Bali’s Business

Bonanza”, Business Day, The Age 14

December 2007

23

Capturing this shopping/

bombing dichotomy a friend of

mine, Toby Sime, graffitis Et in

Al-Qaeda ego around and about

our small eco-tourist, slow-

food town, after the Latin Et in

Arcadia ego (meaning I too was in

paradise). I recently

subjected an excerpt from a

Jensen podcast to a decentralised

Cagean mesostic procedure, to

create an example of what I want

to call slow text – a text where the

once streamlined words become a

little disobedient on the page:

so, if you can sliDe your

premIse-

S by people you’ve got

theM... so, in the new

book I didn’t

wAnt to do that. I

waN-

Ted to

Lay out my

prEmises in

bold fa-

Ce so,

If people don’t like the premises

they won’t get suckered in...

so, the first premise of the book

is that

industrial

ciV

I

L

I

Z

A

T

I

O

N is not

and can never be sustainable.

Here we begin to encounter a

resistance to the eye.

In his talk Jensen went on to

say that any population centre

reliant upon the importation

of resources can never be

sustainable. He is a primitivist.

It’s very easy to argue his case

that progress is killing us. If we

have the will to squint five or

ten tones through the spin in

any direction, we can see this.

Jensen believes that the only truly

sustainable level of technology

was that developed in the Stone

Age. Masdar, a small,

oil-funded city being built in

Abu Dhabi in conjunction with

the World Wide Fund for Nature

(WWF), is hoping to challenge

this view. Masdar will be the

world’s first zero-carbon, zero-

waste, car-free city, making it,

according to its creators, a global

benchmark for sustainable urban

development. However

there is still the problem of the

city, especially the millions of

extremely toxic pre-existing

cities which Masdar does not

address. This city’s concept seems

like another case of Monbiot’s

parallel market – a technology-

driven, design-based eco-bubble.

On the Masdar website

(www.masdaruae.com) the Abu

Dhabi government and the

developers list a number of key

objectives, which in principle

sound like commonsense. But

the urban mentality is a deeply

conceited one, and so when I

read the following objective, my

already diminishing enthusiasm

gave way to full-blown cynicism:

HABITATS AND WILDLIFE –

All valuable species to be conserved

or relocated with positive mitigation

targets.

I’d like to slow this sentence

down in a tonal way and suggest

some subtext and critique by

means of a greyscale.

All valuable species ...

whose values and what are the

criteria for these values that

determine one species’ worth

over another’s? ...

to be conserved ...

the gentrification of some

of nature is an acceptable

compromise for our important

new city ...

or relocated ...

the inconvenience of the natural,

uncivilised world is apparent

when the planner rules straight

lines, draws up objectives, walls

a city off from undesirables or

forcibly relocates them ...

with positive ...

spin

mitigation ...

a legal term to make a crime

appear less serious ...

targets.

habitats and wildlife can be

managed by stats, numbers and

lines on graphs and spreadsheets

– the sort of simplistic arrogance

that has necessitated the building

of this city in the first place.

Did you spot all six tones, or,

rather four between 0% white and

100% black? Note: after

the ‘with positive’ entry I have

written the word ‘spin’ with 0%

ink, but it blends in so well it is

invisible.

24

25

Masdar is a grandly-designed

pilot plan conceived by heroic

architects and designers for

the rich. The civilised world’s

answer to the question of the

future city will be walled to

protect food crops from the

harsh desert winds. But as we

have seen throughout history,

walls serve many purposes,

and I wonder if the switch to

efficient buildings, renewable

energies and organic foods will

be enough to shift the exclusive,

destructive and elitist mindset

of its inhabitants? But

let’s reduce the scale of change

to the everyday, to the here and

now and imagine the impact it

would have if our newspapers,

tomorrow, were printed in slow

text with vegetable-based inks

– so that the words of our court

journalists and spin doctors

couldn’t slide by so fast, and so

that our composts could become

less toxic. Generated by chance-

based computer programs, the

type might look something like

the paragraph above.

from the rest of the world: The

root of the difficulty is that we have

developed the power of thinking so

rapidly and one-sidedly that we have

forgotten the proper relation between

thoughts and events, words and

things.27 Like Gertrude

Stein, Watts is particularly

conscious of the civilised mind’s

dissociation from the body, and

he points the finger at language:

Words and measures do not give life;

they merely symbolise it.28

Accepting this goes some way to

explaining the idiocy and cruelty

of centralised societies, and how

a reliance upon the importation

of resources, for instance, that

seemingly make us ‘civilised’

(meaning ‘of the city’) in real

terms make us abusers and self-

abusers.

There is no artifice or clever

design here – dice were rolled to

create variation throughout the

text. The ‘soldiers’ look more like

deserters or people of all colours

and persuasions. How possible

would it be for corporations and

governments – with their fast

texts – to slide their premises by

us if they were dressed-down in

slow text? Would propaganda

survive as successfully if it

were more slowly accessed; if

there was more resistance to

the eye? Imagine a billboard

with the words cities can never be

sustainable treated in slow text,

replacing the giant Hummer

SUV advertisements currently

posted above Melbourne streets.

In The Wisdom of

Insecurity: a message for an age of

anxiety (1951), Alan Watts outlines

what he perceives to be the

human mind’s limitations in

understanding its displacement

The clutch we have over things as

artists, architects, designers and

plann

ers is precisely the clutch we

have over things as people. This is

the psychology of unsustainabil

ity – ma

king art that reduc

es the simple

infinity of nature into si

mplistic little

boxes and straight lines.

27. Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity: a message for the age of anxiety, Rider, 1997

(first published 1951) p.41.

28. ibid, p.45.

26

27

28

Watts again: We have been taught

to neglect, despise and violate our

bodies, and to put all faith in our

brains. Indeed, the specialised disease

of civilised man might be described as

a block or schism between his brain

and the rest of his body.29

Watts refers to the knowledge

of traditional communities

when he writes that the body is

contiguous with the rest of the

world, so that the air and water

are as central to us as our lungs

and heart. It seems crazy that this

simple statement is a revelation

for us today – its foreignness goes

some way towards explaining

why in rich nations we so blindly

disregard that which truly

supports us. Monbiot agrees: The

rich nations seeking to cut climate

change have this in common: they lie

… The governments making genuine

efforts to tackle global warming are

using figures they know to be false.30

Another lie specific to

industrial-digital civilisation, and

one used especially by members

of the American empire, is the

super-gentrification of barbarism

– suited men and women spin-

speaking the word – democracy

– but not practising the thing

– by the people for the people.

Jensen illustrates this

when he shows how a CIA Torture

Manual becomes a Pain Compliance

Manual becomes a Human Resource

Exploitation Training Manual,

1993.31 Three easy language shifts

create an enormous lie – that

torture is a considered practice

that can be acceptably taught and

applied by the rational and sane.

The civilised mind tends to

create a gated existence –

individualistic and detached

from a consciously active, actively

conscious relationship with the

natural world. This makes it

easy for us to elect and re-elect

governments who place a higher

priority on individualism and

self-interest, than on collective

social and environmental health.

McLuhan: The idea of detention

in a closed space as a form of human

punitive corrective action seems

to have come in very much in the

thirteenth and fourteenth centuries –

at the time perspective and pictorial

space was developing in our Western

world.32 When the

former Australian immigration

minister, Phillip Ruddock, a key

player in the recently ousted

Howard government, visited

the concentration camp he had

helped create in 2001 on the

tiny Pacific island of Nauru, it

was reported that he walked

past a welcoming line-up of

detainees ignoring every single

one of them. For Ruddock to have

personally acknowledged the

incarcerated Iraqis, Afghans and

Iranians he would have had to

face the personal horror he was

subjecting these people to – no

news, no services, no place to

call home, no work, no access

to communications, no future.

These refugees – many

of whom had fled the Taliban and

Saddam Hussein regimes, and

who might well have been seen

as allies in the War on Terror – put

on brave smiles to mask their

misery, in the hope of some word

of liberation from the Amnesty

International badge-wearing

Ruddock. Not only did he not

acknowledge them, he left them

on the island for a few more years.

In 2003, the 95 Iraqi refugees

were sent back to the country

Australia was helping to plunge

into civil war.

Æmpiricism>–

b

b o

b o m

b o m b

b o m b s

o m b s

m b s

b s

refugeesearefugeesearefugeesearefugeesearefugeesea s

29. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity: a message for the age of anxiety, p.53.

30. George Monbiot, Bring on the Apocalypse: six arguments for global justice,

Atlantic Books London, 2008 p43.

31. Derrick Jensen, Endgame, Volume 1: The Problem of Civilization, Seven Stories

Press, 2006.

32. McLuhan The Medium is the Massage,

p61.

29

Meanwhile, back in Australia,

our cities filled with government-

produced posters requesting that

we report anything suspicious

– such as baggage left in public

places – the implication being

that terrorists might already

be among us. Also raised was

the possibility that groups of

refugees attempting to reach

our shores in small leaky boats

may well include terrorists. In

late 2001, with falling popularity

before his third-term election,

John Howard declared: We will

decide who comes to this country

and the circumstances in which they

come. And he romped

back to power. With

Nauru, Australia outsourced its

abusiveness, at home the Howard

regime successfully frightened

the public enough to maintain

the right to behave in this way for

six more years.

Warming up

Scientists talk about

the improbable origins and

subsequent evolution of life on

Earth as the result of a Goldilocks

Effect – a set of conditions for

life to occur that are not too

much, not too little, not too hot/

cold, wet/dry, but just right. They

speak about the origins and

evolution of life being activated

by a combination of ingredients

such as prehistorical detonations

of a stellar porridge pot rich in

oxygen, iron, carbon, and silicon;

and the Earth’s optimum distance

from the sun. And they talk about

a Greenhouse Effect – a natural

system of cooling the Earth at

night, by releasing from the

atmosphere infrared radiation

which is generated by the sun

during the day. This keeps the

Earth’s average temperature at

around 150 Celsius. Humans have

thrived under these conditions

for thousands of years, growing

and hunting food, working

collectively in small groups,

making art and inventing gods to

celebrate the earth that supports

them.

Within a relatively short period

of time the average temperature

on Earth is expected to rise to 180

Celsius. This is due to a radical

increase in greenhouse gases,

which act like a blanket covering

the Earth, and prevent the heat

generated by infrared radiation

from escaping the atmosphere.

The increase in temperature is

already causing the glaciers and

the permafrost to melt, sea levels

to rise threatening low-lying

coastal areas and islands, and

climate zones to change – some

cooling, some warming. Soon we

will begin to see an increase of

extreme weather events, a decline

of wetlands, a scarcity of fresh

water, a decrease of agricultural

productivity, environmental

refugees, an increase in pests and

pathogens and the expansion

of tropical diseases.

Scientists cannot accurately

predict the future effects that

melting glaciers will have on

ocean currents; they can’t foresee

which areas of the planet will

freeze and which will overheat.

A consensus of scientists and

analysts, however, have estimated

that well before the year 2100,

global warming will have caused

such a scarcity of food and water

that the remaining years of

human existence may degenerate

into a horrible bloodbath.

The pop-fascist effect

is Goldilocks without her sensory

faculties. She no longer knows

what is just right, rather she is

unwittingly extreme right, and her

tongue has blistered to show for

it.

30

31

32

Lalgambook

Traditional communities

do not often voluntarily give up

or sell the resources on which their

communities are based until their

communities have been destroyed.

They also do not willingly allow

their landbases to be damaged so

that other resources – gold, oil, and so

on – can be extracted. It follows that

those who want the resources will do

what they can to destroy traditional

communities. —Derrick Jensen33

At a public lecture in

Castlemaine, the historian Ian

Clark read aloud excerpts from

the journals of early European

farmers, who had settled in

the Castlemaine/Loddon area.

Some recalled that significant

numbers of Djadja wurrung men

(of the Kulin nation) had become

farmhands almost overnight,

replacing white hired-help who

had deserted for the goldfields.

In the Loddon region

today, however, the resource most

exploited is not cheap Djadja

wurrung labour, but cheap Djadja

wurrung water.

Coca-Cola Amatil (CCA) and a

number of companies including

Cadbury Schweppes and Fosters

(trading as Spargo) have been

buying groundwater in the area

for just over $2 per megalitre (5c

per tanker!). Privacy laws make it

is impossible to obtain accurate

information from Goulbourn-

Murray Water (GMW), the

company that monitors the

commercial use of this Djadja

wurrung resource. However,

Richard Carter from GMW

confirmed that both CCA and

Cadbury Schweppes have been

taking water from the area for

the past two decades. Bore water,

otherwise known as groundwater,

is transported to the city in

trucks, bottled in plastic, and sold

as a convenience commodity for

around $2.50 a litre, at the time

of writing. This compares with

a cost of 1c per litre for tapwater.

The CCA product,

named after the significant

Loddon region landmark Mt

Franklin, is the largest brand of

bottled water in Australia, and

has approximately 70% of the

national market. Before settlers

and gold miners had dispossessed

the Djadja wurrung of their

land and resources this ancient

volcano, from which the brand

name derives, was known by the

Djadja wurrung as Lalgambook.

On its website CCA claims:

Mount Franklin water comes from

the most pristine and sustainable

water sources in Australia. It took

a mere 30 years of European

occupation – between the mid-

1830s to the mid-1860s – to see

the Djadja wurrung eradicated

from the region, the last refuge

being the Loddon protectorate at

Mt Franklin. Despite

the sympathetic efforts of the

chief protector of Victorian

Aborigines G A Robinson and the

Mt Franklin protector Edward

Parker, the miners and squatters

who appropriated the land

had both official and unofficial

authority of entitlement to it. In

his research paper concerning

the massacres and killings of

Victorian Aborigines, Ian Clark

writes: Edward Parker believed that

by the time he had established his

permanent station at Mt Franklin

in 1841 the Djadja wurrung had

recognised the overwhelming power

of the whites to exclude them from

their lands…When the local aboriginal

people first met [Edward Parker],

they ... enacted the ceremony of the

tanderrum, or ‘freedom of the bush’,

a diplomatic rite symbolising the

landholder’s hospitality, in which

strangers were allowed temporary

access to clan resources after a ritual

exchange of gifts. 34

I have conservatively estimated

that for each $2 CCA spends on

“purchasing” Djadja wurrung

groundwater, the profit after

production, salary, advertising

and distribution costs is in the

vicinity of $1–3M.

33. Jensen, “The Problem of Civilization,

Premise Two”, Endgame Volume 1, p.IX.

34. Ian D Clark, Place Names and Land Tenure – Windows into Aboriginal Land-scapes: essays in Victorian Aboriginal Histroy,

Ballarat Heritage Services, 2003, p.117.

33

34

One day last year, I spent seven

and a half hours walking every

street in Melbourne’s CBD

locating and testing public

drinking fountains. Of the

28 that I found, only 19 were

fully operational. I made a

map for myself and others,

showing where to access free

drinking water while visiting

the city. An estimated 710,600

people use Melbourne’s CBD

every day.35 This means there

is approximately one working

public water point for every

40,000 people. The

only thing we can reasonably

assume from this is that the

City of Melbourne wants people

to buy their water packaged in

plastic, that it fully supports

the privatisation of water, and

is happy to encourage unethical

corporate behaviour.

35. Referenced from the City of

Melbourne website, 2007

36. Julian Lee, “Message on a bottle

labelled as greenwash”, The Sydney Morning Herald, 27 February 2008.

37. Jason Koutsoukis , “The real cost of

bottled water”, The Age, 19 August 2007.

38. Source: The Australasian Bottled

Water Institute Inc. 2006.

39. Derrick Jensen , “Bringing Down

Civilisation”, http://www.tucradio.org/ 0913jensenone.mp3 and http://www.tucradio.org/0920jensentwo.mp3

CCA’s spokeswoman (former

ABC radio schmooze) Sally Loane,

doesn’t see what all the fuss is

about. In a recent Age article

she was quoted as saying, Any

individual who claims that we ‘rape

the environment’ is speaking from

the depths of ignorance … we are

committed to being a good corporate

citizen, particularly when it comes to

water.36 In an earlier Age article,

titled The Real Cost of Bottled Water,

she stated, There is a market for it.

Consumers like the convenience of

bottled water. A lot of people believe it

tastes better. It’s nice and cold. That’s

what consumers want, and that’s

what we’re giving them.37

Loane is effectively saying that it

is ok to burn 314,465 barrels of oil

every year to produce the plastic

for Australians’ bottled water 38;

that the large number of these

bottles that end up as landfill

and general waste has little to do

with her company; that it’s ok to

have polluting trucks running

up and down our highways for

the sake of a resource already

gravity-fed to our taps; and that

the renaming of Lalgambook to

Mt Franklin is an appropriate

exploit in light of how her

company occupies Mt Franklin as

a brand name today. At

the Oakland talk last year Derrick

Jensen paused from his address

to the large group of students

and digressed: If I had a thing of

bottled water I would hold it up and

say this is why we’re not going to have

a revolution, because if people will pay

for water bottled in plastic they will

suffer any indignity.39

As Jensen reminds us in Endgame,

if you abuse downwards on the

societal ladder there is far less

accountability or scrutiny than

when you abuse upwards. But

what really makes our high-

end abusers so camouflaged, so

protected from scrutiny? The

recent film The Corporation – which

Rupert Murdoch tried to have

censored – lays out a meticulous

answer to this question, namely:

When corporations want things

they attain the same legal

rights as a person, but when

corporations are scrutinised

they can miraculously turn

themselves back into a thing; a

brand or a label that cannot be

held accountable in the same way

a person can. Jillian

Broadbent’s corporate portfolio

is a stunning trifecta when it

comes to bottled water. As well

as being a director of CCA, she

sits on the board of Woodside

Petroleum and has just been

re-appointed to the board of the

Reserve Bank of Australia. The

chapter of Broadbent’s résumé

related to the arts assists with her

corporate camouflage. She has

been on the board of the Sydney

Theatre Company, a founding

director of the Australian

Brandenburg Orchestra, and

a Trustee, Vice President and

Treasurer of the Art Gallery of

New South Wales and in 2005 she

was appointed Chairman of the

National Institute of Dramatic

Art.

35

36

PANOPLYFASCISM

37

In rich nations such as Australia

the arts act as capitalism’s

moderator or patronised

spouse. For many high-end

arts organisations, employing

corporate fiscal strategies

and personnel simply means

continued – and often increased

– high-end patronage.

My own low-end cultural

practice, as played out in the

film Lalgambook, is in the form

of poetical terrorism or physical

graffiti, where public space is

disrupted – even terrorised

– by ambiguous and poetical

interventions. At commercial

outlets I leave stickers on the

caps of bottled water directing

consumers to a website (www.

myspace.com/justfreewater) where

they can access a range of articles

concerning water, packaging,

governments and corporates –

counter-propaganda.

When I see a vending machine

selling refrigerated water and

junk food items, if I can find the

switch I turn it off. This simple

act of anti-corporate activism in

the everyday is a liberty-chaser.

A small shock of adrenaline

charges through my body as I

flick the switch. It is not from

a sense of hope that I carry out

these physical poems – poems

that practice in the space of the

everyday – but rather from the

consideration: traditional forms

of poetry seem ridiculous this late

in history.

UK economist Nicholas Stern’s

gloomy ‘Report on the Economics

of Climate Change’ does not

cause me to fly to Thailand and

live out civilisation’s final years

in a debauched and drug-crazed

reverie, although it’s tempting.

I will stay in Djadja wurrung

country as long as I can, ’fess up

to white occupation and continue

to compost. When the crash does

come – with mass death caused

by failed crops and lack of water –

the role of people like Broadbent

and Loane should be publicly

known. Regularly

switching off vending machines

that sell water bottled in plastic

makes barely a ripple in terms of

tackling our problems with the

physical world, but conceptually

it’s a big leap forward. Accept-

ance of a reliance upon the

importation of resources is our

civilisation’s zeitgeist – our

cultural pathology – and it needs

to be switched off. If we

are killing people and habitats for

oil to maintain our toxic lifestyle

now, then what future violence

awaits us with diminishing

water supplies taken from

small communities and bottled

in plastic for massive global

shareholder profits?

Art of the problem

Where do I begin and

end in space? I have relations to the

sun and air which are just as vital

parts of my existence as my heart.

—Alan Watts40 Long

before reading the likes of John

Cage and Derrick Jensen, I spent

a considerable amount of time

making, moving, planting and

installing things in the area of

the Wombat State Forest that lies

between the upper tributaries of

the Loddon and Coliban rivers.

I made graffiti in the bush.

The Helen Lempriere

National Sculpture Award is an

annual Australian art prize that

takes place at Werribee Mansion,

just west of Melbourne. I’m not

normally interested in an event

or activity like this, however the

prize money could keep you alive

for years. For this reason in 2005

I sold out and bought a ticket in

the lottery, submitting some of

my bush graffiti works. I was a

short-listed finalist with a one in

twenty-nine chance of winning.

Needless to say I didn’t, but as

I’d come close, I tried again the

following year.

While developing my 2006

submission I walked around

Werribee Mansion’s grounds,

thinking about the building and

its history. It is a classic example

of occupationist architecture –

a colossal monument to colonial

empire-building by private

money, in bricks and mortar. I

stood on the vast, water-thirsty

lawn where drought-hardy

wallaby grasses had once

grown, and I faced the building.

40. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity, p.46

38

39

It stood to attention, humour-

less and arrogant, surveying its

own wealth. My eyes fixed on

the forty metres of sandstone

balustrade spanning the second

storey balcony. I imagined

adding to its already locatable

and mortared repression at home,

expansion abroad appearance 41 a

blaze-red vinyl banner with my

own ‘expression fixé’: Everyday

consensus is no counter power to

the psychopaths of everyday rule.

Werribee Mansion

began life as a shrine to stately

imperialism and was then a

draughty Christian seminary

for a few decades. These days it

is an exclusive, centrally heated

restaurant and luxury hotel

geared to accommodate high-

end corporate conferences – and

in its grounds, a yearly national

sculpture prize. In

2006 my proposal wasn’t even

short-listed, so I gave up the

gambling game and went back

to doing what I do best – making

temporary autonomous zones.42

Following is an excerpt

from the document: The Australian

Law Reform Commission Inquiry into

Schedule 7 of the Anti-Terrorism Act

(No. 2) 2005 and Part IIA of the Crimes

Act 1914 Submission by The National

Association for the Visual Arts (NAVA)

10 April 2006, which describes the

background to one of these zones.

7.4.3. In 2006, just prior to the staging

of the Commonwealth Games in

Melbourne, the Victorian State

Government used the Commonwealth

Games Arrangements Act which gave it

the power to remove all graffiti, stencil

art and political posters from public

places in Melbourne. Premier Steve

Bracks was reported as declaring this

intention publicly, vowing that within

two hours of posters going up they

would be removed. Melbourne City

Council followed through by painting

out and obliterating all the street art it

could find in a bid to present a “clean

city” for the Commonwealth Games.

Artist Patrick Jones initiated a protest

against this act of cultural destruction

and censorship. Melbourne

is internationally renowned for

having one of the most vibrant and

creative street art scenes in the world,

something Jones was keen to protect

and promote. So he photographed

stencil and graffiti art at risk of being

cleaned away and made a series of

placards with these images. He joined

with a group of friends and carried

the placards through the city [over

several days during the time

of the games] as a roaming wall

of protest. Jones was questioned by

police for the action but was allowed

to continue unhampered.

At this time Jason Workman and

I were helping each other with

individual projects. We had days

in Melbourne handing out bogus

leaflets and pasting up our own

public notices, carrying out what

we called reverse thefts or add-ins

to retail spaces. When

Workman moved to Brooklyn

in 2007, he found employment

fabricating large-scale sculptures

at a reputable art foundry. After

some weeks he told me that the

conditions for the workers were

pretty terrible, especially as it was

summer and full body suits,

masks and goggles had to

be worn in an unventilated

workshop. The

foundry’s clients included high-

profile artists such as Barbara

Kruger, Paul McCarthy and Chris

Olfili. Workman told me that

the hazardous waste from the

factory is dumped directly into

the gutters, and the toxic resins,

plastics and fibreglass particles

are allowed to blow around the

streets of the local, largely Polish

neighbourhood.

I should add that

foundry employees were never

invited to the exhibition

openings of the works that they

had made. After a few months

the social and environmental

conditions became too much,

and Workman left.

I googled Kruger to find some

apt quote of hers regarding abuse

and/or misuse of power – there

have been so many. Her widely

documented art text Abuse of

power comes as no surprise, and

that of her contemporary, Jenny

Holzer: Protect me from what I want,

had first sprung to mind. But I

wanted to find something less

notorious to capture here. Instead

the following Sotheby’s online

catalogue entry spoke to me:

Lot 353 is a fine large photographic

silkscreen on vinyl by Barbara

Kruger (b. 1945). Entitled “Not Stupid

Enough”, it measures 109 inches square

and was executed in 1997. It was

included in the retrospective exhibition

on the artist in 1999–2000 at The

Museum of Contemporary Art in Los

Angeles and the Whitney Museum

of American Art in New York. It has

an estimate of $250,000 to $350,000.

41. Adapted from the quote: Civilization originates in conquest abroad and repression at home. Stanley Diamond quoted in

Derrick Jensen, Endgame (Vol 1), p.15.

42. Hakim Bey, “The Temporary

Autonomous Zone”, Ontological Anarchy, Poetical Terrorism, Autonomedia, second

edition, 2003.

40

41

42

We will never attain the level of

sustainability required to save

our species from annihilation

while our culture is founded on

such pathology that a photo-

graphic silkscreen print is worth

$250,000 or more. As civilisation

and its cities have developed

away from natural world cycles,

our art has become a pointless,

dislocated commodity of abuser

culture. Artists who choose to

dwell in cities make art based on

the pathologies of their urban

environment, and then sell their

work in order to survive there.

It’s a narrow, self-serving cycle

of resource wasting.

A recently-seen documentary,

The Real Dirt on Farmer John,

puts Kruger and Co into some

perspective. It’s a film about

the everyday life of a farmer,

John Peterson, who grows

food and makes art inclusively,

with little separation between

tilling, despairing, writing,

constructing, failing, loving

and heaving. Unlike Kruger’s

art, which attempts to critique

Western (specifically male)

brutality but itself ends up as

another power base fighting

for both capital and egotistical

space – for transformation

– Peterson’s documentary

highlights an art that belongs

to the farm, to a specific location

and to natural cycles – art that

centres on making in the space

of the everyday; art that involves

many participants. But the

transformationists are never

far away.

For twenty years Peterson

endured the wrath of his

Christian neighbours for not

thinking the baby Jesus a

particularly interesting figure

in the scheme of biodynamic

life. The Real Dirt

on Farmer John surveys a life’s

body of work. It documents

the trials and tribulations of

an independent farmer in the

midst of the corporatist welfare

state that is US agriculture.

Peterson’s collaborations with

singer/songwriters, filmmakers,

playwrights, poets and artists are

inculcated into daily life on the

farm. One of the most impressive

results of this life’s work is the

year-round provision of bio-

dynamic fruit and vegetables to

around 6,000 Chicago families

from Peterson’s small Round-up

Ready-free farm. Just as

Peterson’s agricultural output is

not museum quality, so too his

filmic memoir has not generated

the waste typical of civilised art.

As an occasional set builder on

films I have experienced first-

hand the tremendous waste that

results from their production.

In direct contrast, Peterson is

an example of the kind of artist

whose work the world could

really eat now.

Tonight a friend emailed me

requesting a radio advertisement

for a student sound project she

was doing. I responded:

EXCLUSIVE only to reformed

collectors of fine art comes

COMPOSTED ART TEA!

Cultural waste product has never been

so available so we’ve DESIGNED

a product to take care of the surplus

and, what’s more it can be delivered

to your door free of charge. Impress

your friends with AFFORDABLE

ART at its most rotting.

When you need that extra something

for your garden hang the expense

and think: COMPOSTED ART

TEA! Dribble some on the

lettuces and in a few weeks see them

explode with a simultaneous contrast

of colours. Garlic has never tasted so

delicious; rhubarb never possessed

such form! So, in order to

meet future standards in art practice

the BEST of modern culture has

undergone our most rigorous aerobic

pitchforking. We’re talking

painting, sculpture, writing, drawing,

installation art, pop and folk shopping

music, fashion, set construction, design

– even gallerists and museum staff are

in the mix. COMPOSTED

ART TEA! Mixing art with

the whole environment!

43

44

45

image captions All images are by Patrick Jones

unless otherwise indicated

front cover• untitled photograph

(yellow road sign) 2005 (detail)• Nicholas Hansen (Mutiny Media),

documentation of WorkmanJones’ practice, Melbourne CBD 2006 (detail)

inside front cover + p1• entrance brass, Reverie Books,

Trentham, Victoria, 2005 • untitled photograph

(yellow road sign), 2005 (detail)

pp.2 –3 • untitled photograph

(yellow road sign), 2005 (detail)• front room Reverie Books,

Trentham, Victoria, 2005

p.4• Dualism~Fuelism, Patrick Jones,

White-Ant #2 anthology, How do you know what the truth is? White-Ant Press, Melbourne 2005

p.7• Cage books, personal library, 2005

p.9 • painted rock (with Zephyr),

Wombat Forest, Victoria, 2005 (detail)

pp.10–11 • painted rock (detail)• Homage to Duchamp, coffin

intervention National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2005 (detail)

• Chance, film still (with Toby Sime and Michael Farrell), Centre Place, Melbourne 2006 (original footage: Ivor Bowen) (detail)

pp.12 • Chance, film still (detail), with

photograph intervention (single dot) by Peter Tyndall

p.15 • Zephyr’s play, Melbourne, 2006 p.17• The mind and matter of human hope (a

country party version), ink drawing, 2007

p.19• The mind and matter of human hope (city

version), ink drawing, 2007 (previously published in Going Down Swinging #26

pp.20–21 • be your own Ian, street sign

intervention, Melbourne, 2006. Photograph: Mel Ogden

p.22 • Swanston Street tree intervention,

Melbourne, 2006. Photograph: Jason Workman

p.25 • Jason Workman, Words against

Capitalism booklet, add-in (reverse theft), Melbourne shoe store, 2006, (previously published in, Patrick Jones, “The Word as Art”, Artlink vol 27 no 1, 2007)

• Jason Workman, add-in (reverse theft), tourist bureau intervention, Melbourne, 2006

p.27• bus-stop add-in, Melbourne, 2005• Department of Lost Liberties, letter sent to Liberal and Labor

politicians, 2005

p.28• phone booth add-in, Trentham,

Victoria, 2005

p.31 • Letter to the editor, The Age, 5 July 2007• free-hand graf, Melbourne, 2006

p.32• Double white Australia line policy

(A4 version), Trentham-Daylesford Road, Victoria, 2005

• Lalgambook film still (with Josh Bowes). Image: Meg Ulman, 2008

p.34• map of Melbourne’s public drinking

fountains, drawing, 2007

p.35• Roundup Ready public water drinking

in Melbourne, 2007

p.36• Just Free Water, participant, New

Years Eve Parade, Daylesford, 2008, Photograph: Kyle Barnes for The Advocate newspaper

p.37 • concrete poem with Mt Franklin

water bottle stand, 2007

p.39 • Pine for the scarce hell leaky cum primates

and the war gas, Wombat Forest, Victoria, 2003

• unsuccessful HLNSA proposal, 2006

p.41 • A Temporary Autonomous zone – Roaming

Graffiti Wall (with Jason Workman, Peter O’Mara, Ivor Bowen, Tim O’Sullivan, Petra Beuskens, Nikki Blanch, Cath Ryan, Tara Gilbee, Jeff Stewart and Jasmine Salomon), 2006. Photograph: Penny Stephens (reproduced courtesy of The Age)

• Jason Workman, public notice intervention, Melbourne 2006

p.42• Jason Workman, stencil,

Carlton park, Melbourne 2006• Situationist quote (1969) intervention,

(with Hen and Millie Cheshire and James Holden), Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2006

pp.44–45 • home compost with hand-shredded

Free-dragging Manifesto draft manuscript, Daylesford, 2008

pp.47 • Nicholas Hansen (Mutiny Media)

documentation of WorkmanJones’ free-dragging practice, Melbourne CBD, 2006 (detail)

pp.48–63 • Nicholas Hansen (Mutiny Media),

documentation of WorkmanJones’ free-dragging practice, Melbourne CBD, 2006

pp.64–65• home compost with family

pitchforker, Daylesford (with Meg Ulman), 2008

p.67 • More Prohibitions in the Age of

Interpretative Signage, 2005 (CAD drawings by Multiplicity)

46

PHOTOGRAPHS BY NICHOLAS HANSEN

a free-dragging manifesto

Page becomes stage transfigured into time-bracketed instances of a continuous present; written language becomes a surprising performance of its charged materiality. —Joan Retallack1

47

Wishfulness is conscious defeat. Hope is delusion.

Hope is fast food for the demoralised. Hope is

unburnt fat. Hope – an addiction concurrent with

the mainstay pathologies of civilisation – sugar-oil-drugs-

gods etc. Hope is the desire for transform

ation.

1. Joan Retallack, ‘What Is Experimental Poetry & Why Do We Need It?’ Jacket 32, April 2007. http://jacketmagazine.com/32/p-retallack.shtml

48

Hope is no good matter. Transformation is

spin. Spin is counter to the rotation of material life.

Hopefulness is mind over matte

r. To trust

the pathological stake

holders of civilisatio

n – monotheists-

governments-corporatists – is ho

peful defeat. Spin

49

is the first cousin of hope. Spin is fast text.

Spin is the art of selling something hopeful which ends up

wasteful. Hope is waste. Was

te is the non-

compostable by-product of the centralised – the civilised.

Waste has no bounds. A city

’s reliance upon

50

the importation of resources impoverishes its citizens

who in turn impoverish and toxify the land. The

Cuban says: ‘the food has to be walking distance’2.

In the rich nations the reliance upon the importation of

resources occurs through the outsourcing of brutality –

2.Roberto Perez, visiting Cuban permaculturalist, speaking at Daylesford Town Hall, Victoria, Australia, 3 April 2008

51

forests cleared, soils contaminated

, air polluted, soldiers

shipped, oceans vacuumed of life and used as dumping

grounds. It is hopeless. Free-dragging is the

practice of hopelessness. Free-drag

ging is monist.

We practice hopelessness with the acceptance that

52

material life is all we have and when it is over it is over.

Hopelessness becomes inspiration – inspiration,

the tenacity to act independent

ly of governments and goods

and gods. Anxiety is hope

fulne

ss transfigured into fear.

Fear empowers the authority of governments and

53

goods and gods – the debts of which demoral

ise and enslave.

This entire cycle is wasteful and hopeful. We

are enslaved to amaterial structures - taxes create borders –

borders create gods and armies – the killing schedule proceeds

on our side’s beha

lf. Hopele

ssness as practiced in

54

free-dragging is li

beration – which manifests materially as

poetical terrorism – the material trans

ference of which is non-

delusional play – civil disobedience. Free-dragging is

aerobic poetry of the body – free-dragging is pitchforking.

Free-dragging is anaerobic poetry of the mind – we

55

two worms forever crawling. We are materialists

because we are purely mind and matter. We need two

good mea

ls a da

y and the ‘irreducible complexity’3 of the

sun, soil, seeds and water to have this. The Cuban says: ‘ca

tch

your own water, grow your own food, say hello to your

3. from Darwin’s ‘organs of extreme perfection and complication’, as revisted in Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, 2006.

56

neighbour.’4 The earth, air and water as lungs,

heart and brain. The aesthetic-athletics and ethics of

free-dragging are inde

terminate and mutab

le. The

re

is no authority here. Authorship is immutab

le

constraint. Authorship is court journalism – the

4. ibid. Roberto Perez. 57

dutiful reportage of spin and gree

nwash. Free-

drag

ging is the poem writte

n by the body – physical graffiti

kicking in the street. As so

on as it is writte

n it is gone.

God obsolete. In nature change is recu

rrent.

Seeds grow publicly and find opportunities for

58

autonomy. We defend this. We practice

in the space of the eve

ryday. We ripen and fall like

public fruit, bletting on the street. We understand

enslavement when we free-drag. We understand

the conventions that enslave – paying interest upon interest.

59

In small collectives we act fo

r ourselves. We do not

need supermarkets. We share water and grow fo

od.

No need for governments. We defend ourselves in

small communities. Nation-states dissolve. Cage says:

‘We must make the ear

th safe for poverty without dependence

60

on government.’5

The waste architect packs thermal

mass into old car tyres – rammed earth off the grid.

Night falls. We drag each ot

her through the city an

d

jump into building skips, our stockings ladder. Oil

peaks. Lying on the bi

tumen our hands in the soil turn it over.

5. John Cage, Anarchy, Wesleyan University Press (1988), 2001. 61

62

63

64

This work is compost ready.

65

Patrick Jones A Free-dragging Manifesto

[how to do words with things]

Published by Tree-Elbow Publications

July 2008 Edition 750 isbn 978–0–9580307–4–8

Jointly published with subtext: Peter O’Mara

©/ Patrick Jones. All rights relinquished

with the exception of the following images:

p.36 © Kyle Barnes, The Advocate

cover, pp.47–63 © Nicholas Hansen,

Mutiny Media (www.mutinymedia.com)

p.41 © Penny Stephens, The Age

acknowledgements

A Free-dragging Manifesto has been made possible through

the generosity and support of a number of friends and

collaborators. Peter O’Mara put the flint to the stone

in suggesting it was time we produced a joint book. His

friendship is purely and simply a central mechanism for

this work. Jason Workman believed in co-originating

a practice of self-liberation. His considerations, poetical

activities and friendship are at the core of this work.

Kate Fagan provided an early editorial framework and

suggested the title. Filmmaker and photographer

Nicholas Hansen provided quality photographic document-

ation and important editorial input. Verity Higgins

(RAV) assisted with the funding process and helped Peter

and I to mediate our language for the application.

Peter Tyndall, both formally and informally committed

his support to this project. Vivienne and Ross Ulman

gifted hours of proofreading, critical editing and belief.

Thanks to Vivienne Shark LeWitt for some timely and

helpful comments. Ian Robertson once again provided

an important philosophical environment with the design.

His ideas and friendship significantly shaped this work.

Jude Walton provided a critical eye to our practice,

and laughed and frowned at appropriate and inappropriate

moments. Zephyr has kept me on my toes and

fingertips, and has taught me everything I know and don’t

know about being a dad. Meg Ulman essentially

funded this work with love. Her sensitivities to other people

and the planet are a daily source of inspiration.

funding

This project has been made possible by the

Australian Government’s regional arts program,

the Regional Arts Fund, which gives all

Australians, wherever they live, better access

to opportunities to practice and experience the

arts. The Regional Arts Fund is administered in

Victoria by Regional Arts Victoria and funded by

the Department of Communications Information

Technology and the Arts. The Regional Arts Fund

is an Australian Government initiative supporting

the arts in regional and remote Australia.

production

Graphic design: Ian Robertson

Printing: Finsbury Green Printing, Melbourne

Printed using vegetable oil-based inks

on Printspeed Laser – a paper produced with

elemental chlorine-free pulp derived from

sustainable plantation forests

tree-elbow publications

PO Box 482 Daylesford Australia 3460

Email treeelbow@gmail.com.au

66

67

subPeter O’Mara

(HOW TO DO WORDS WITH THINGS) text